328 Euclid Avenue is an urban infill site in downtown Toronto. Dean Goodman and Janna Levitt designed the house for their own use on a standard 20 foot wide downtown lot. Their intention was to build a small house of approximately 1,550 sq. ft., which would use a pragmatic approach to green building practices. It is two storeys high plus a basement, and utilizes all of this space to maintain a small footprint on the lot. The layout anticipates the changing needs of a family with teenagers and how the house may evolve over time as the children grow up and leave home. Modest in size, the main floor has an open floor plan of approximately 16’ x 55’ with large sliding doors at the front and back. This, coupled with a 12 foot ceiling height, contributes to the feeling of a generous interior larger than its actual size. Large windows allow for excellent natural light throughout the entire house and provide a sense of space, helping to moderate the long dark Toronto winter.

Acquisition of an adjoining site made possible a new extension to an existing Victorian period house in Brondesbury, North London, which had stabling at ground floor level originally. This enabled a doubling of the original volume and transformation into a stunning contemporary home for the two occupants.

This house sits in a corner of a large lot in the center of Bridgehampton, New York. Reminiscent of an old farmhouse with it’s simple shape and repetitive openings, also shares it’s DNA and it’s open space plan with that of a New York loft.

The renovation of this 80-sqm-apartment located on the last floor of a traditional early 1900 English villa has used a very linear design as a frame for an eclectic mix of modern, ancient and ethnic details.

The designers found a space that had been strongly transformed during the last renovation made in the 80’s. Revisiting the stylistic choices made in order to lighten and de-materialize the existing structure, they tried to create back a dialogue with the traditional architecture.

The timber structure in Korean traditional architecture presents fundamental nature of sustainability, maintaining the concept of physical space (whole) even after continuous renovation, change and transformation of materials (parts). Using the mode of ‘Prefabrication’, we attempt to reconstruct the space of living, based on ‘Madang’, an empty space with multiple functions and diverse social implications. Two base modules are used to create the diverse configurations, the solid and the void. The module in the Korean traditional housing is called ‘Kan’, the bay between columns. It needs bigger timber necessary to build larger ‘Kan’, which makes it very expensive to construct. Also, more ‘Kan’ implies bigger scale of construction, implying socio political values in the modularity of architecture. Sometimes, the housing is moved to other locations after the disassembling and reassembling, since permanent joint connection is rarely used in the traditional timber technique. The material is continuously replaced and reconfigured to strengthen the sense of space, emphasizing the relationship between the solid and void, the nature and architecture. The ‘Madang’ in Korean housing is naturally a void, a left over space. It is open framework between public street and private housing so that it can serve for either the public event, or extended private function. In the modern multifamily housing equipped with market driven globalization, the void has been disappeared. Without the void, apartment housing is the repetition of same plans. The functional space standardized the way of living. The façade becomes thin membrane dividing the public and private. Therefore, Prefabricating the void suggests to reconstruct diverse function of voids by prefabrication in architecture, giving depth to the façade, providing open framework for the residents to use with various purposes.